Hollywood won't decide the US election

Spielberg's Lincoln biopic and Kathryn Bigelow's Zero Dark Thirty may have been held back until after the votes are counted, but do US voters ever allow themselves to be swayed by what they see at the cinema?

Two movies scheduled for release in the US on 26 December – a traditional slot for hot Oscar contenders – may make poignant viewing for the political classes. They are Kathryn Bigelow's Zero Dark Thirty, a dramatisation of the mission that killed Osama Bin Laden, and Steven Spielberg's Lincoln, a biopic of the 16th president.

If, during that holiday season, Barack Obama is preparing to begin his second term, the films will make pleasant chat at inauguration parties and help to burnish his legend. The Obama administration co-operated with Bigelow in the making of her film – there are allegations that the Pentagon released classified material to the director – while Spielberg, an Obama supporter, chose the end of the first term to make a film about a previous tall orator from Chicago who advanced the cause of race relations.

However, should Mitt Romney be celebrating Christmas as president-elect, Republicans will congratulate themselves on their anti-propaganda operation, while Democratic moviegoers fume about what might have been.

Commentators on the right had fretted that, if Zero Dark Thirty and Lincoln were released before the election in November, they might serve as propaganda weapons fired by a Hollywood long suspected (a charge that is hard to deny) of leftwing sympathies. Spielberg insists that he always wanted to go out post-election, fearing that the film would become "political fodder". And Bigelow's studio denies that an October release was ever confirmed and then delayed. Even so, the row over the release dates raises the question of whether what the electorate sees with its popcorn ever could dictate behaviour in the polling booth.

A scene from Kathryn Bigelow's Zero Dark Thirty, about the capture and assassination of Osama Bin Laden. Photograph: Jonathan Olley/jonathanolley.co.uk

In 2008, Oliver Stone shot and edited W, his biopic of George W Bush, with unusual rapidity so that the film could be released during John McCain's election campaign, possibly as an intervention against the Republican candidate. It could be argued that Stone's JFK, released just before the 1992 election, helped the campaign of Bill Clinton, who, as a teenager, was pictured with Kennedy.

Two brutal Clinton-era films depicting the White House as a den of sex and murder – Clint Eastwood's Absolute Power and Murder at 1600, with Wesley Snipes – were not released until 1997, after the safe re-election of a president who had been accused by his more committed opponents of both sexual depravity and homicide.

Americans, though, seem to make little connection between fictional and factual presidents: Clinton served for eight years during which film presidents became increasingly psychopathic, while George W Bush was in every way the opposite of the key made-up leader of his time, Martin Sheen's President Bartlet in The West Wing.

The only movies that had a decisive effect on an American election were released four decades before the race they influenced. Knute Rockne, All American (1940) and King's Row (1942) gave Ronald Reagan the fame, nickname ("the Gipper") and optimistic spirit that made him a two-term president.

However, even if Eastwood announces tomorrow that he is rushing out, ahead of November, a biopic in which the Gipper is played by fellow cinematic Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger, it's hard to believe that Obama and Romney's poll numbers would move much.

• This article was corrected on 30 August 2012 because Oliver Stone's film W was not released when George W Bush was running for re-election, but at the end of his second term, when John McCain was the candidate.